Prologue

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Prologue: Selected Articles

Racial Identity and the Case of Captain Michael Healy, USRCS, Part 2

The younger Michael Healy took a different course; he chose,
in a sense, to wear a different kind of uniform from the
religious garb of his siblings. Born in 1839, he followed the
well-worn path of his older brothers from Georgia to Holy Cross
College. He was, however, an independent and often difficult lad,
and he kept running away into the surrounding countryside, never
getting very far. He was also sometimes subjected to the jibes of
his classmates. Though he was very fair in complexion, students
at the school who had known the other members of the family,
especially the dark-skinned Sherwood, often taunted Michael about
his mixed race background. "Remarks are sometimes passed which
wound," his brother Patrick, back at the college for a time as a
teacher, told a friend. "You know to what I refer," he added,
unwilling to commit the family's racial secret to paper. "The
anxiety of mind caused by these is very intense."(10) Young
Michael's own reactions were not recorded, but these experiences,
coming when he was just a teenager, seemed to breed in him an
aggressive personality, one that left him hot tempered and eager
to prove himself before anyone could make unwelcome "remarks."

Michael Healy's letter of application to the Revenue Cutter Service claimed
that his parents "procured for me a birth [sic] as boy," when in reality he
ran off to sea. (NARA, Records of the U.S. Coast Guard, RG 26)

By the beginning of the 1854 school year, other academic
arrangements were necessary for Michael. He was "a source of
great anxiety to us," Patrick reported, and "his conduct hitherto
gives us no reason to hope for a change." James Healy, acting now
in the role of substitute parent, was just then completing his
seminary training in Paris, and he hit on the idea of bringing
Michael to France and enrolling him in the famous seminary at
Douai--but not "to make a priest of him," he said, realizing that
some things were out of the question. Rather, this move would
"give him a chance to redeem his lost time and character."
Running away from the French school was more difficult, but it
also opened up more exotic possibilities, and Michael rose to
them. In the summer of 1855, he fled to England, and there he
felt the pull of the sea, taking a berth as a cabin boy on a
merchant ship bound for the Far East. In later life he would
carefully revise his biography for these years, saying that this
had all been arranged by his parents--they had been dead for five
years by then--"in order to punish me for my misconduct."(11) In
fact, the idea had been his alone, and it set him off toward his
true calling.

If we can believe his own later account, he spent the next
several years wandering the world: India, China, Africa, the
Caribbean and the Mediterranean, England, and America. He had a
real aptitude for the work, and he rose through the lower ranks
to first mate. The life was "comparatively easy, having never
suffered actual shipwreck," though lesser disasters were met and
surmounted. By the time of the Civil War, he was in Boston with
much of the rest of the family, and he was filled with a
"definite determination" to continue his seaborne life in the
Revenue Cutter Service. Part of the Treasury Department, the
service was a civilian agency that supervised the coastal trade,
pursued and arrested smugglers, enforced treaties regulating the
international fisheries, and provided emergency assistance on the
high seas. Enlisting in September 1863, Michael Healy made his
formal application for a commission a year later. He was just
twenty-five, but his experience was impressive: "have been to sea
for nine years, and have been three times second officer and once
first officer of a brig." He had not done as well as he had hoped
on the written examination, but captains under whom he had served
attested to his ability and promise.(12)

He was also able to marshal some important political
endorsements. By now, his brother James, who had hoped for
redemption of his character a decade before, was clearly on his
side. More to the point, he was also in a position to be of
practical help in securing an officer's rank. James had become
the chancellor of the Catholic diocese in Massachusetts and
secretary to its bishop; in fact, during much of the Civil War,
while the bishop himself was in Europe in a vain attempt to
recover his health, James Healy was the de facto leader of
Boston's growing Catholic community. That role put him in regular
contact with some very important people who were now encouraged
to support Michael Healy's cause. John A. Andrew, the staunchly
pro-Union governor of Massachusetts, wrote to Washington, urging
swift and favorable action on the appointment. "I do not know
[Michael] Healy myself," he explained to a Republican ally in the
capital, "but I am well acquainted with his brother, Revd. James
A. Healy, the Secretary to the Bishop of this Diocese; and if one
can argue from the qualities of a clergyman to those of a sailor,
and the two brothers are alike, I should say that you would have
few brighter and more capable young officers in your Revenue
Marine than Healy." Other church contacts paid off as well. The
bishop of Portland, Maine, who had almost certainly never met the
candidate, sent a recommendation directly to the Secretary of the
Treasury, William Pitt Fessenden, who happily enough was from
Maine. All the lobbying paid off, and by January 1865 Michael
Healy's appointment to the rank of third lieutenant came
through.(13)

He had found a career in which his racial heritage, were it
known, might not have been quite the disability that it was
elsewhere. Work on the sea offered unusual opportunities to
African Americans throughout the nineteenth century: aboard ship,
raw ability and level-headedness in a crisis simply counted for
more than skin color. Moreover, during the war, the U.S. Navy had
recruited more free blacks and former slaves than the reluctant
army, though it drew the line at commissioning them as
officers.(14) Against this background, Michael Healy was less
likely to suffer disadvantage from a society that, in spite of
his physical appearance, was still prepared to define him as
black because of his mother's racial classification. He was
unwilling to test that possibility, however, for he and his
family had come to identify themselves insofar as possible with
the white community. Some of those endorsing the young officer's
case knew his mixed racial background--others surely did not--but
none of them ever mentioned it, then or later. Like his brothers
and sisters, he defined his own racial status as white, and his
decidedly light skin permitted him to do so. The taunts he had
endured at school had only reinforced his intention to put behind
him any suggestion of blackness, and his new career could
insulate him from similar insults in the future, just as his
siblings' careers in the Catholic Church insulated them. His own
embrace of whiteness was also confirmed by his marriage to Mary
Jane Roach, the daughter of Irish immigrants to Boston, in
January 1865, just one week after his Revenue Cutter Service
appointment became official.(15) For the remainder of his career,
all those who met him--fellow officers, crew, and others--simply
assumed that he was white.

Healy was a capable officer, and his progress up the service
ladder was steady. His first assignments were on the east coast,
but by the middle of the 1870s, he was posted to California for
duty in the Arctic fleet. The United States had only recently
purchased Alaska, and while most of the government settled into a
pattern of ignoring the territory, the Revenue Service took it
upon itself to establish a presence there in the interest of
fundamental law and order. Several cutters were based in San
Francisco and Oakland, but every spring they would make their way
up the coast to Washington State before striking out across the
open sea for the Aleutians. From headquarters on Unalaska Island,
they would spend the summer cruising the Bering Sea and Straits,
putting in at various places along the Alaskan coast and at the
Pribilof and other small islands. These were the prime seal
rookeries, and the Revenue Service waged a constant and often
unsuccessful battle against illegal seal hunting. The ships would
then work their way around the top of Alaska, heading as far east
as Point Barrow. These waters had become the principal hunting
grounds for the American whaling fleet, which was enjoying its
last few years of prosperity. The work was dangerous and
unpredictable, with the ice pack never more than ten miles
offshore. As the summer advanced and the ice began to move in,
cutters and whalers alike would break south, but not always fast
enough. Officers like Mike Healy helped pull many ships out of
the ice, rescued the stranded survivors, and more than once
brought back the frozen bodies of the less fortunate. With only
minor blotches on his record, Healy was commissioned a captain in
March 1883.(16)